Permanent Revolution

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Here is a brilliant write up on free speech and resistance in the US of 1930s... so relevant to our own times here....

The Bridgeport
Herald Wages an Important Free Speech Fight

by
Andy Piascik

Rarely
has an American play met with the kind of government opposition that Clifford
Odets’ Waiting for Lefty faced in
1935. Mayors and police departments forbade the staging of the play in a number
of cities and stopped performances mid-play in others. Audience and cast
members were arrested for protesting police actions. Locally, the Bridgeport Sunday Herald rallied to the cause of
the play after it was banned in New Haven and thus played an important and
honorable role in defending free speech.

Clifford
Odets was 28 years old and a member of the left-wing, New York-based Group
Theatre ensemble when he wrote Waiting
for Lefty. (1) It was the first of his plays to be staged when it opened in
a Group production at the Civic Repertory Theater on West 14th
Street in Manhattan on January 5, 1935. (2) Among those in the cast were Odets,
Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb. (3)

Waiting for
Lefty
is often described as a play about a strike of New York taxicab drivers. While
it is that, it’s more a penetrating look at the lives of a group of people who
happen to be cab drivers as they cope with poverty and related personal, family
and relationship problems at the low point of the Great Depression. The cabbies
do discuss going on strike, and they also struggle with the risks involved, one
of which is the fact that their union is controlled by racketeers violently
opposed to any kind of independent labor action.

The
drama in Waiting for Lefty was
straight out of the front pages of newspapers throughout the country and thus resonated
with audiences. In the months leading up to the play’s opening, there had been
general strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo. Workers were
organizing in great numbers and left-wing parties and organizations were
stronger than in many years.

Waiting for
Lefty’s
run at the Civic was such a rousing success that it moved to Broadway in June,
1935. Because of great demand and in keeping with their philosophy of making
plays easily accessible to the poor and working classes, Odets and the Group took
the unusual step of approving productions throughout the country before the play’s
Broadway premiere. In no time, labor unions and cultural organizations began
staging Waiting for Lefty in dozens of
cities and towns. Among them was a production by the New Haven John Reed Club’s
Unity Players at Yale University’s University Theatre. (4)

In
at least six cities including Philadelphia, Boston and Newark, city officials
either shut productions down after performances had begun or forced cancellation
of performances before they could be staged. In Newark, the play was stopped in
mid-performance and a number of audience members who protested were arrested.
The stated reason in some cases was that the play was “Communist propaganda”
and “un-American.” In Boston, profanity -- use of the word “God-damn” was
specifically cited – was the pretext.

The
production in New Haven, meanwhile, won the George Pierce Baker Cup for first
prize in the Yale’s annual Drama Tournament on April 11th. In response to the wildly
enthusiastic reception, the Unity Players booked space at Commercial High School
for additional performances. Several days before the first scheduled show,
however, the New Haven Board of Education rescinded the agreement and Police
Chief Philip Smith declared that the play was not to be performed anywhere in
the city on the grounds that it was “blasphemous and indecent.” He added that
anyone attempting to do so would be arrested.

The
Unity Players brought together the American Civil Liberties Union, community
organizations, and students and faculty from Yale, among others, and formed the
New Haven Anti-Censoring Committee. They held rallies and meetings demanding
that the city allow the play to be staged but Smith did not budge. Then the
Bridgeport Sunday Herald got
involved.

Founded
in 1805 and located at 200 Lafayette Boulevard, the Herald’s motto was “No Fear, No Favor – The People’s Paper.” The
paper first reported on the controversy in New Haven on the front page of its April
14th edition. In that same issue, it ran a glowing review across
three pages of the New York production of Waiting
for Lefty by Leonardo Da Bence. In the April 21st edition, in
response to the continuing ban in New Haven, the Herald’s editors printed the play in its entirety. Also included
was a lengthy introduction that included criticisms of Chief Smith and that
concluded that the Herald’s intention
was to give “its readers an opportunity to judge for themselves.”

Though
based in Bridgeport, the Herald had
influence well beyond the city. It published editions and special sections for
areas throughout the state including a New Haven edition that was available on
newsstands in that city. (5) Among its criticisms of New Haven officials, the Herald noted that the city had granted
space to an avowedly fascist organization for a meeting at a public school
simultaneous to the banning of Waiting
for Lefty.

In
its edition of May 5th, the Herald
reported the results of a poll of readers in which it stated that respondents
in favor of the staging of Waiting for
Lefty in New Haven outnumbered those who supported the ban by 10 to 1. The Herald regularly featured a Letters to
the Editor section that often extended over several pages and one letter from
Allen Touometoftosky began as follows: “Long live the militant, truthful
Bridgeport HERALD! Long live ‘Waiting for Lefty!’”

With
the groundswell of protest growing, Chief Smith and the City of New Haven
finally relented. The Unity Players were allowed to reserve the Little Theatre on
Lincoln Street several blocks from Yale and performances of Waiting for Lefty began there on the
evening of May 9th. The play was received much as it was around the
country by enthusiastic full houses, without incident or further police
interference. (6)

While
Waiting for Lefty has never been
revived on Broadway, it remains popular in local theaters and union halls. It
has played many times in Connecticut over the last 72 years including a production by The
Connecticut Repertory Theater that ran earlier this year in Storrs. When the
play was most recently done in New Haven in 2012 by the New Haven Theater
Company, some newspaper commentary recalled the controversy of 1935. (7)

The
Bridgeport Herald, meanwhile, published
until 1974. It is remembered with a degree of fondness by older Bridgeporters
and was the subject as recently as 2015 of a panel at the Fairfield Museum and
History Center. (8) It should also be remembered for the important role it
played in a free speech fight 82 years ago.

Thanks to Danielle Reay of Yale University for
research assistance

1.Clifford
Odets (1906-63) was best-known for his plays Awake and Sing (1935) and Golden
Boy (1937), in addition to Waiting
for Lefty. He also wrote a number of Hollywood screenplays, most notably None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957). The lead
character in the Coen brothers’ 1991 movie Barton
Fink was inspired in part by Odets.

3.Among
the Group’s members were actors Phoebe Brand (1907-2004) and Morris Carnovsky
(1897-1992), who married and lived for many years in Easton. Though neither
appeared in Waiting for Lefty, both had
distinguished theater and film careers interrupted by many years of being blacklisted
because of their political affiliations. Carnovsky in particular was a
long-time fixture on Broadway and at the American Shakespeare Theater in
Stratford.

4.The
John Reed Clubs were named after the American journalist and revolutionary John
Reed (1887-1920) best known for his eyewitness account from Russia in 1917 Ten Days That Shook the World.
Reed is the subject of the 1981 movie Reds.

5.Because
of the involvement of the Bridgeport-based Herald
in advocating for the showing of Waiting
for Lefty, some accounts mistakenly refer to the controversy as having
occurred in Bridgeport rather than New Haven.

6.Also
featured during Waiting for Lefty’s
run at the Little Theatre were modern dance performances by Miriam Blecher
(1912-79) and Jane Dudley (1912-2001). Dudley in particular was a trailblazer
of modern dance who featured themes of social protest in her work. She was for
many years a leading force in the New Dance Group and a teacher at the Martha
Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

The controversy
surrounding Waiting
for Lefty is covered in a number of books
including Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century
(2009) by John Houchin; Banned Plays: Censorship Histories of 125 Stage
Dramas (2004) by Dawn B. Sova; and Censorship: A World Encyclopedia (2002)
edited by Derek Jones.

Friday, January 20, 2017

V.Krishna Ananth (Inventing Traditions and Orchestrating
‘Protests’)

The
mobilisation in the streets now witnessed in Chennai and elsewhere in Tamil
Nadu demanding that the Supreme Court’s interim order against conduct of
jallikattu is anything but ‘protest’. The ‘crowds’ are orchestrated by the
‘leaders’ (some of them pulling strings from behind the scenes) is happening
when the agrarian crisis is claiming lives across the state. That the regime in
Tamil Nadu is behind this orchestration is something that needs very little
evidence. And in the event, the record of the state administration in dealing
with protest demonstrations against its indifference to the farm crisis, where
protesters are detained in a routine fashion while letting disruptions in
arterial roads in the state capital is proof that the demonstrations are not
spontaneous in any sense.

One is
reminded of the manner in which elected representatives and public servants let
people immolate themselves after the then Chief Minister, late J.Jayalalithaa,
was sent to jail some months ago. This is also no different from the pogroms
that were allowed by the police in Delhi and other towns in October-November
1984 or across Gujarat in February-March 2002. The point is that such vulgar
display of arrogance and murderous streak by mobs are inimical to democracy and
history is replete with experience where the rulers plan and orchestrate such
expressions where it suits them.

The
street shows across Tamil Nadu now are also inimical to democracy for another
reason; that this is done in defence of tradition and culture. The business of
jallikattu, which is known to have its sponsors from among the thevar community
(to which the Chief Minister O.Panneerselvam and the ruling AIADMK general
secretary V.K.Sasikala belong to), is not too different from the vulgar games
that were played in the amphitheater in ancient Rome. It used to be where
well-bred slaves were thrown into the arena to fight with each other and the
victor was ordered by the nobles to kill the one whom he overpowered in the
fight; legend has it that Spartacus was not killed by his fellow slave who was
then killed by the nobles in the arena. The episode is symbolic of the earliest
of the revolts against slavery and Spartacus the earliest rebel.

The
Roman ‘tradition’ where slaves were denied of human rights is indeed what makes
historians challenge the notion that Rome was a Republic. The French Revolution
of 1789 and its call for liberty, equality and fraternity, that led the path to
modernity was not condemned by sensible men and women of having been against
tradition. Indeed, it made the world a better place where people challenged
such brutalities peddled in the name of tradition as inhuman and barbaric. This
indeed is what ought to be done with jallikattu as well. Instead, those who owe
their allegiance to the Constitution (particularly the leaders of the various
political parties, both elected and the losers in the various elections) are
now engaged in inventing traditions rather than interrogating them.

Condoning
such acts amounts to the same as such perversion as celebrating sati (that
barbarous practice of throwing the widow into the funeral pyre of her dead
husband) or infant marriage oruntouchability in the name of tradition.

Meanwhile,
the point at issue here is not merely about animal rights, which for some
reason is that being articulated in the discourse now. Jallikattu involves the
rights of human beings, sometimes well-bred by the elite in our times to fight
and tame the bulls and in that sense as it was done by the nobles in the Roman
amphitheaters. Ernest Hemmingway brings this out in his passionate narrative of
the bull fight ‘tradition’ in Spain in his ‘Death in the Afternoon’ where matadors
and bulls are bred to die and make others happy! It is time that the vulgarity
in the name of protest in Chennai and elsewhere is brought to an end and the
Constitutional scheme is preserved. And if the State Government drags its feet
here, Article 356 of the Constitution is indeed meant to be invoked in such
occasions and contexts.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Politics in Tamil Nadu post Jayalalithaa

The
demise of J.Jayalalithaa in December 5, 2016, could usher in a radical
transformation of the political course in Tamil Nadu. The decimation of sorts
that the Congress party suffered since it lost power to the DMK in 1967 seemed
to have been reversed since 1977 when M.G.Ramachandran took away a chunk from
the DMK with him and wrested power in the elections to the state assembly in
March that year. That was the first ever elections for his fledgling ADMK and
the party won 130 of the 200 seats it contested. The DMK was left with only 48
seats and the Congress won 27 seats. The Janata Party, whose juggernaut did not
work in the Southern states, then won only 10 of the 233 seats it contested
from.The point is that the Congress,
even after winning 27 of the 198 seats it contested, seemed to be fading out
from Tamil Nadu.

Things,
however, changed soon. The DMK, without any compunction (M.Karunanidhi’s
government was dismissed by Indira Gandhi in January 1976 and many DMK leaders
were jailed under MISA since then), struck an alliance with the Congress(I) in
January 1980 elections to the Lok Sabha and MGR’s ADMK, in alliance now with
the rump Janata Party was routed. The ADMK, still ruling Tamil Nadu, was left
with just two MPs and the Janata won none. He did dump the Janata, now in
shambles even in the Northern states and stuck with the left parties to salvage
his ADMK when elections were held to the state assembly in June the same year.
He retained power even after the DMK-Congress combine remained intact and reversed
the trend that seemed to emerge just a few months ago. The ADMK won 129 seats
in the 234 strong House while the DMK’s strength came down from 48 to 37 and
this despite its alliance with Indira Gandhi’s Congress.

Although
MGR dabbled with the anti-Congress consolidation that was emerging again in the
early 1980s with non-Congress Chief Ministers holding conclaves and raising
issues regarding fiscal federalism, he was astute enough to not leave the
DMK-Congress alliance intact. It was then that he found a role for his former
colleague in cinema, J.Jayalalithaa, who had joined his party in 1982. She was
sent to the Rajya Sabha and she seemed to have carried out her brief far too
well. The Congress(I), in which Rajiv Gandhi had begun playing an important
role, was persuaded by the ADMK’s propaganda secretary (a post that was created
for Jayalalithaa) to dump Karunanidhi’s party and team up with the ADMK. It was
sometimes then that MGR rechristened his party as the All India ADMK. The
supremo fell ill even before elections were announced in 1984 but his own
illness and the demise of Indira Gandhi and the televised mourning and funeral
ensured that the AIADMK-Congress(I) combine swept the polls in Tamil Nadu. Elections
to the Lok Sabha and state assembly were held simultaneously then and the
AIADMK won 132 of the 155 seats it contested while the Congress(I) won 61 of
the 73 seats it contested. The DMK was left with the CPI and CPM as allies and
together they won only 31 seats in the 234 strong House.

This
background, indeed, then shows that the Congress remained relevant in Tamil
Nadu and was even in a position to tilt the balance between the DMK and the
AIADMK. It is also significant that the AIADMK, under MGR, managed two things:
One to retain and consolidate its core support among the poor across the state
and the noon-meal scheme that MGR introduced, improvising upon an idea that
K.Kamaraj had experimented with when he was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu
between 1954 and 1963. And two to keep the Congress party on his side. This
worked in MGR’s own time and even after when Jayalalithaa took over the party,
established herself as MGR’s legatee among the people against similar claims by
the late Chief Minister’s wife, JanakiRamachandran. The two ADMKs, as the party split, were defeated by
Karunanidhi’s DMK in the 1989 elections to the state assembly. The DMK also
tied up with the anti-Congress National Front headed by V.P.Singh and the
AIADMK appeared a party that was over.

But
this was when politics in the state was undergoing another churning; the social
mosaic that helped the DMK establish itself – the vanniar community – in the
Northern Tamil Nadu ever since 1957 and was held on by the party even after the
advent and growth of the ADMK. It changed since the late 1980s when the vanniar
community was mobilized by Dr. S.Ramadoss and a violent agitation demanding the
Most Backward Classes status to them swept the region when the DMK was in power
from 1989. Karunanidhi’s gamble to stoke tamil identity sentiments around the
anti-Tamil pogrom in neighbouring Sri Lanka did not work; though MGR too had
taken up this cause and associated himself with the LTTE in the early 1980s,
the DMK was seen as aiding the militants in Tamil Nadu, at least after 1989 and
the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, while elections were on, on May 21, 1991,
left the DMK running for cover. The AIADMK, now under Jayalalithaa along with
the Congress(I) swept the polls; both to the Lok Sabha and the state assembly
held simultaneously in May-June 1991. The DMK won just a couple of seats in the
assembly and none in the Lok Sabha.

Jayalalithaa
now was unstoppable; she even managed to prevail upon the Congress party
against impeaching Justice V.Ramasami for his excesses as Judge of the Punjab
and Haryana High Court involving financial impropriety. It is appropriate to
note that the judge to be impeached happened to belong to the thevar community,
as also does Sasikala, who had then become Jayalalithaa’s aide. Her kin,
V.N.Sudhakaran was now decalared Jayalalithaa’s foster son and his big fat
wedding showed he in poor light. She erred on this and many other instances of
brazen show of power and authority but her party was, without doubt, under her
command. The problem, however, was that the Congress leaders in Tamil Nadu
revolted against the high command (well; P.V.Narasimha Rao could hold his party
under his thumb only for a while and ceased to be a commander after Sonia
Gandhi blessed a revolt against him) when the Congress decided to go along with
the AIADMK. And the DMK patriarch lost no time striking an alliance with the
Tamil Manila Congress to sweep the elections. The point is that the Congress,
an ally of the AIADMK since 1984 was now with the DMK. Notwithstanding the PMK,
that Dr. Ramadoss had floated, eating into the DMK’s traditional base, the DMK
could wrest power in 1996.

Jayalalithaa,
now picked up the ropes and bounced back in 1998 cobbling up an alliance with
such parties as the PMK, the MDMK (that had split away from the DMK in 1994) and
most importantly the BJP, which at the national level had now managed to
supplant the Congress(I). The alliance won as many as 35 of the 39 Lok Sabha
seats from Tamil Nadu; the AIADMK won 18 and the BJP, for the first time,
opened its account in Tamil Nadu winning 3 seats. Far more important was that
Jayalalithaa emerged a powerful player in New Delhi with her 18 MPs crucial for
the BJP-led government. Her command like hold on her MPs was proved when they
cringed before her in full public glare (even while they held ministerial
offices in the Union Cabinet and she was only out of jail on bail facing
charges of corruption in Tamil Nadu) and the Parliamentary Party simply bowed
before her when asked to withdraw support to the Atal Behari Vajpayee government
in April 1999.

She
switched to the Congress(I) again in September the same year and managed to
retain 10 Lok Sabha seats in the general elections. She also helped the
Congress(I) win two seats and the CPI(M) win one. Most of these happened to be from Southern
Tamil Nadu where the AIADMK under Jayalalithaa had consolidated itself among
the dominant thevar community. Jayalalithaa, meanwhile, worked on getting the
PMK back to her fold and this she managed in time for the 2001 state assembly
elections. She also managed to get the Tamil Manila Congress, whose birth
itself was to oppose her in 1996, and thus returned to power in May 2001. The
alliance with PMK, particularly, held her in good stead; and more importantly
weakened the DMK in the northern districts, its traditional stronghold. 132
seats out of the 141 the party contested and Jayalalithaa was back as Chief
Minister. She ensured that ministers in her cabinet were left insecure and were
sent out when she wished. None dared to ask her why. She dumped her pre-poll allies and picked up
new ones in 2011 (it was the DMDK this time) to win another election and dump
them soon after.

It was
her ability to do all these and carry her partymen wherever she decided to go
that left the DMK scourging for partners and stay afloat. She mastered the art
of talking directly to the people (well she did that hardly and let her larger
than life posters to connect with the people). He rewarded policemen even while
they were seen as guilty of violating human rights in the search for Veerapan,
the brigand who was hunted down in the forests. Strictures against the police
force by as mighty an agency as the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) did
not hold her back and she held a state function to reward them with land and out-of-turn
promotions. She conveyed to the budgeoning middle classes in Tamil Nadu that
the state needed such a force and she also expanded the scope of welfare
measures to keep the poor and the lower middle classes contended. She kept her
party under her feet and ensured that ministers and MLAs orchestrated mass
support day after day.

This
long background will help see the shape of political developments in the
immediate aftermath of her demise and what holds for the party she had
commanded all the while.

Announcement
of Jayalalithaa’s demise, late in the night on December5, 2016, seemed to have followed some
discussion and consultations among the party’s ‘leaders’ and Ms. Sasikala
Natarajan apart from the BJP’s M.Venkaiah Naidu. The anointment of O.Panneerselvam
as Chief Minister seemed natural; he had, after all, been the one she chose to
hold office on occasions when she had to. First when her party won the majority
in the state assembly elections in May 2001 (in which her own nomination was
rejected on grounds of her conviction in a charge of corruption) and the
Supreme Court subsequently held against her claims to the Chief Minister’s
office in September that year, Panneerselvam was anointed Chief Minister. He
promptly resigned the day his ‘amma’ qualified for office after the Supreme
Court held her ‘innocent’ of the charges. He was thus Chief Minister of Tamil
Nadu between September 21, 2001 and March 1, 2002.He returned as Chief Minister, once again, on
September 29, 2014 after ‘amma’ was convicted by the Karnataka High Court on
charges of holding assets disproportionate to her known sources of income. As
it happened, a Division Bench of the same High Court quashed the earlier order
on May 11, 2015. ‘Amma’ Jayalalithaa waited until the eleventh day after her
acquittal and Panneerselvam put in his papers on May 22, 2015, vacating the
throne once again.

It
could have been that all those who confabulated at the Appolo Hospital during
the couple of hours before Jayalalithaa’s demise was announced were unsure of
their own prowess and decided to invoke what could have been amma’s will in the
event. Well. As things have been unraveling since Panneerselvam seems to have
some more credentials too than having
been the rarest among the AIADMK ‘leaders’ on whom the party supremo had
complete faith. That his anointment now had taken shape in a gathering
including Sasikala suggests he was the aide’s nominee even on earlier occasions
and Jayalalithaa seemed to execute what her aide wanted. None in the party protested
then; not even in whispers. But with ‘amma’ gone and Sasikala now out in the
open, there are some in the party who seem to have gathered against
Panneerselvam. And the daggers are likely to be out when the party, after the
ritual of mourning, meets to ‘elect’ its general secretary.

The
AIADMK has 136 MLAs in the state assembly. 117 is what it needs to command
majority in the House and there was no way that the party would have lost power
in normal times, I.e. when Jayalalithaa was around. The additional numbers – 19
MLAs – was more than what the AIADMK needed to complete its five year term. All
these, now, seem to be past. And Panneerselvam will need a lot of blessings,
not only from Sasikala but also from the ruling BJP in the Centre to keep his flock
together and fore-close the possibility of M.K.Stalin, leader of the 88 member
strong DMK-legislature party (along with the 8 Congress MLAs) staking claims
for the Chief Minister’s job in the event of a revolt in the AIADMK legislature
party against Panneerselvam. While the Chief Minister’s proximity with
Sasikala, thanks to caste they both belong to, may have been his strength in
the night on December 5, 2016, the same may cause his fall in the event.

The thevars, after all, are not the
only dominant intermediate caste in Tamil Nadu and the AIADMK has a substantial
following among the Kongu Gounder community, dominant in the Western parts of
the state; it was from this region that the AIADMK gathered mass since its
inception in the 1970s and many of those are still around in the party to
contest Panneerselvam’s claim. While a rebellion of this kind will depend on
how deep Sasikala has entrenched herself by way of posting officers of the
police and civil administration loyal to her across the state and how much the
potential rebels are vulnerable (in other words as to how well would they be
able to keep skeletons from tumbling out of the cupboard), the fact is that the
AIADMK will no longer have a leader who can relate as ‘amma’ did with the
people of Tamil Nadu. It is also unlikely that none in the party, including
Sasikala, can aspire to be perceived by the people as MGR’s legatee as they
perceived Jayalalithaa.

The point is that the AIADMK cannot
be the same as it was under Jayalalithaa. And it is unlikely that it will
remain as ‘disciplined’ as it was until December 5, 2016. And given the
fragmentation of the polity and the various caste groups now having thrown up
parties seeking to represent their own sectarian interests, as Jayalalithaa is
no longer the present and is past, the space hitherto occupied by the AIADMK in
Tamil Nadu could now be up for grabs. From what it looks like, Sasikala could
end up offering the space to the BJP and that could happen only if Amit Shah’s
party manages to survive the adverse effects of the November 8, 2016
announcement on currency notes by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tamil Nadu,
after all, is a state where money circulation has remained high and pervasive.
It is another matter that Sasikala can manage to keep Panneerselvam as Chief
Minister if she wants it that way and gets help for this from the Union
Government the way governments were made and unmade in Uttarakhand and
Arunachal Pradesh in recent months.

Friday, May 27, 2016

History is not about the ‘greats’
any longer

A
letter from V.K.Singh, Junior Minister in the Ministry of External Affairs
asking that Akbar Road be renamed as Maharana Pratap has now turned into a
public debate. While it is one thing to debate on the role of kings and queens
in history and whether at all such memory should be ensured by way of naming
streets and roads in our towns, there is indeed a larger issue involved in
these and it is one that involves the understanding of the discipline called
history.

And
even before elaborating on this, it is appropriate to place on record that
Minister Singh’s concerns have nothing to do with any serious reading of the
history of the Battle of Haldighati or the guerrilla attacks that Maharana
Pratap carried out against the Moghul chieftains anointed by Akbar after he
defeated the Mewar ruler in 1576. And even if Minister Singh had studied some
of these during his training at the military academy, his concerns could not
have been that of a historian. He would have been taught the tact of guerrilla
warfare in the academy only to deal with the enemy and not to valourise them.
Let me not quarrel with such pedagogy for it is, perhaps, justified as long as
it is done in order to train the officers of our armed forces.

But
then, as minister in the constitutional scheme, Singh should realize that he is
no longer a soldier and that the armed forces are under the command of a
civilian in our scheme now. That we are not a military state and that we, as a
nation, had consciously opted for a constitutional democracy against having a
general at the helm of our polity (even if the general happens to be a good
person) is a fact that Singh had accepted when he took oath as a minister in
May 2014. And that is why it makes sense to expect him to behave a civilian and
thus respect history and events to be studied the way a historian would do.

It
is true that history, as a subject, was taught as merely a narrative involving
kings (and queens occasionally). Such narratives, based on accounts handed over
by chroniclers, obviously accorded the victors with honorific suffixes. The
chroniclers, after all, were courtiers who lived and prospered singing hosannas
to the victors and hence it was quite natural that some kings were described
the ‘great’: It is not only about Akbar but Alexander too was described in our
school books as the ‘great’. However, one has not come across a worthy French
historian using such an honorific suffix to Louis XIV (even while he is
credited of holding ‘I am the state’) or to Napolean Bonaparte who took France
out of the dark ages of the Jacobin terror; nor has any English historian
sought to honour Admiral Wilson as the ‘great’.

The
point is that the age of revolution in Western Europe, during which kings and
nobles were ousted, also known to have marked the birth of the enlightenment
era in history led to a departure in the way history as a discipline came to be
seen. Rather than being reduced to a chronicle of events or simple narratives,
history began to be seen as studying the past. To paraphrase
E.H.Carr, an author whose work is textbook for students of history in any
university worth its name, that history is a continuous process of interaction
between the historian and her/his facts, an unending dialogue between the
present and the past. The point to be emphasized here is that history is about
studying the past and not just reading or learning names and dates by rote.

And
by studying the past, where the historian and her/his facts are necessary to
one another (once again from Carr), the discipline assumed a new meaning with
the focus shifting from personalities to processes. More precisely, the Moghul
era, as much as the period before that in Indian History came to be probed for
such aspects as the social life, the economic structure, the process of surplus
generation and thus locating the contradictions within that forced the rise and
fall of not only different empires but also systemic changes. The lead in this
regard came from Enlightenment historians and was picked up in India by the
Marxists.

Now,
Minister Singh and his new found follower, N.C.Shaina (whose comparison between
Akbar and Hitler revealed a certain disdain for history and its rigours) may
jump around and declare their disdain to Marx and Marxist historiography. But
then, this indeed is the critical point. Attributing ‘greatness’ to a ruler,
whether Akbar or Maharana Pratap in this context, is indeed a prism through
which history is sought to be studied by those who will then end up either
celebrating one or the other king; the trouble is that this method will lead
the historian to either condemn one or the other and ignore the fact that there
existed people, the ordinary people who were held far away from the courts and
the palaces to produce the surplus that went into the making of these empires
and the comforts that the kings and their courtiers lived in.

And
such a history will then condemn the rebels, primitive or organized, as bandits
or troublemakers. Just as the colonial administrators and their chroniclers
described the rebellion of 1857 as a mutiny triggered by rumours of beef or pig
meat being used to grease the cartridges of the enfield rifles! The problem is
that this method of reading the past only through the regimes and the rulers
and their goodness (or badness) helps shroud the people, particularly the
oppressed, in a society into the oblivion. That the Bhils, among whom Maharana
Pratap lived after escaping the Moghul army in Haldighati rose in rebellion
subsequently and contributed in their own way to the making of modern India is
what makes history a weapon in the making of democracy. Honorific suffixes to
either Akbar or Maharana Pratap (or to stretch the argument of ridicule to its
extreme to both) are only attempts to reverse the significant advances in the
discipline of history and take it back to a mere chronicle of dates,
personalities and events.

And
when history is taken back to its pre-enlightenment stage, the dangers are
two-fold. One is that it will make the subject too boring and useless that
children will not only hate it but will also find it useless; how does one with
mere information on what happened when and nothing more become useful to
society? This apart, the bigger threat is when such stress on kings and queens
and one being ‘great’ and another’s claims to that being contested will take us
back to those times from where human civilization has advanced. It is time we
put a stop to this distortion of history.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Never
in the recent past – in the history of independent India – has one seen so much
breast beating on being a nationalist; and similarly such accusations against
many of being anti-nationals for shouting slogans, invoking Section 124 A of
the Indian Penal Code. And if only the Honourable judges of the Constitution
Bench of the Supreme Court, headed by the then Chief Justice, Justice B.P.Sinha
(along with Justices S.K. Das, A.K. Sarkar, N.Rajagopalan Ayyangar and R.
Mudholkar) had foreseen, they may have said, by the way (obiter dictum),
that this section in the colonial code be deleted forthwith. A reading of the
judgment in the Kedar
Nath Singh vs State of Bihar, delivered on January 20, 1962 (AIR-SC-1962-955) cannot
but lead one to this.

Neither the Congress party nor the Janata cared to do that.
And every regime, since then, has invoked this Section of the law and the recent
instance of arresting Kanhaiya Kumar from JNU and some others along with him is
only another instance of the consequence of a certain inaction since January
1962. And this argument will be won if only one tries to look further as to
whether those accused all these years were at all sent up to prison, while the due
process of law was in motion and thereafter as to how many were left free after
being held in jail for long terms (after a while in police custody and forced
to say what the men in khaki wanted them to say while in custody); and in many
instances they were rendered wrecks in the mental and physical sense.

Well. There have been exceptions too when people were not
reduced to wrecks. One such, even if not under this illegitimate law (as Gandhi
described it while charged in the court of Judge Broomfield in 1923), when Section
121 (A) of the Indian Penal Code (a far more stringent law compared to the
sedition law) was invoked against 25 persons; the gang of 25 belonged to
diverse sections of the society and age groups. It included political party
leaders, students, a Gandhian, mill workers and even a prominent industrialist.
In the middle of the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s police held them all guilty of
attempting to wage war against the state and if the `law was allowed to take
its course’ all those would have been sentenced to death, which indeed is the
maximum punishment for a crime. Section 124 A warrants, at the most, jail for
life!

The charge-sheet filed before the Chief Metropolitan
Magistrate court in Delhi contained detailed accounts of how the accused (who
were brought to the court on February 10, 1977 bound in chains as slaves were
taken around in ancient times) had collected 836 nitroglycerine sticks (for use
in making bombs) and even attempted to smuggle 500 low power radio transmitters
into India to disrupt the All India Radio signals. The first accused in the
case spoke eloquently about why he did all that he was accused of for the sake
of the nation and to save it from the un-democracy. The lawyer goons, however,
did not attempt to lynch him as they tried to do with Kanhaiya. Hired hoodlums
did not walk around the capital shouting vande mataram and asking for the
shooting down of those accused.

It did not take too long before the accused were left free
and the charges dropped, within days after the people of India gave their
verdict in March the same year. The first accused in that case, George
Fernandes, would become a member of the Union Cabinet and even the Raksha
Mantri of the Government of India headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee of the BJP,
the party to which Narendra Modi too belongs to! Or Viren Shah, then a member
of the Board of Directors of a pretty big steel manufacturing Company and a
co-accused in the case would become a BJP MP in the Rajya Sabha and Governor
later on! Or Prabhudas Patwari, a Gandhian (68 years old when he was accused of
waging war against the state) would occupy the Raj Bhawan in Madras for five
years! Or C.G.K.Reddy, who had fought for the nation’s independence as part of
the INA (using his skills as a radio engineer and about to be sent to the
gallows if only the colonial rulers were packed off on August 15, 1947) and had
joined Fernandes in 1975 to defend the freedom and was eleventh accused in the
case would breath freedom again and head the National Productivity Council!

It is relevant to recall the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy case
in the times we live in for two reasons. One that the nation, in fact, did not
crumble because of their acts (as held by the state then and as presented by
the police); instead, the nation emerged stronger because of their act. The
Emergency taught the nation of the need for eternal vigilance and that the
nation shall not be restricted in its definition to what the rulers, even if
they were elected at some stage, considered what was good for the people. It was
no wonder. The Constitution, which after all was the culmination of the
national spirit that sent the colonial rulers packing did not leave all the
powers with the elected representatives. The fact that the Fundamental Rights,
including the Right to Free Speech were placed on a pedestal was indeed in
response to the experience with the Third Reich and the disaster such
untrammeled powers to define nation and nationalism was left to the Fuhrer.

The second aspect is that the way in which one section of
the people (only 25 in the Baroda Dynamite case) were held as threat to the
nation, built on the foundation of a massive struggle by the people and their
sacrifice, was not just unfounded but even an insult to its inherent strength.
To hold that students in a university will have to agree with the `elected’
government does militate against the very foundations of our wonderful
constitution and is, in that sense, un-Constitutional.

And those who have gone berserk, only because they all have
been assured that they will not be `dealt’ with under the law to beat up
media-persons and students and using expletives against the teachers in JNU and
elsewhere, are guilty of treating our nation as weak and incapable of taking
dissent. Chanting Vande Mataram was indeed an act of dissent and brave men and
women did that knowing they would be sent to jail for that. But then, it does
not make one a nationalist to shout that in times we live in. And the nation
and nationalism today will have to be seen in another context and not be
reduced to a police-state sponsored act!

The point is that the nation and our nationalism is not as
fragile as it is made out that a few slogan shouters can bring it down. If it
was so, we would have crumbled long ago. It did not happen and will not happen
only if we as a nation agree to disagree; in other words learn to put up with
dissent.